Introduction

In French residential care homes,1 the epidemic evolved in the same way as it did in the general population, with a first wave from March to July 2020 and a second one starting in October/November 2020. In total, 224,500 care home residents were infected, with 29,300 deaths in 2020. The two waves in 2020 led to just under 15,000 deaths (Miron de l’Espinay & Richroch, 2021).

As for the general population, the studies available about the French case point to wide local disparities, with high impacts in some regions (the north, the Paris region, and the east) and lower impacts in others (the west). The pandemic was the cause of 2.5 per cent of deaths in residential care homes, but non-representative surveys, such as one carried out on 52 residential care homes all over the country, identified variations ranging from 2.3 per cent to almost half of the residents dying following contamination (Plateforme de Recherche sur la Fin de Vie, 2021).

On a national scale, during the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in the autumn of 2020, the incidence rate of the epidemic in residential care homes was about 1,600 residents per week for every 100,000 residents, compared to 500 people per 100,000 for the over-70s, and 450 for the general population (Miron de L’Espinay & Pinel, 2021). However, this gap began to shrink considerably in the spring of 2022 thanks to the vaccination campaign, which brought down the incidence rate to 200 for every 100,000 people in residential care homes, making it almost identical to the level for the over-70s, compared to 140 per 100,000 for the general population.